A Compelling Tribute

 

 A Compelling Tribute 

A Lot of Energy Makes a Little Matter, by Jack McWhorter

Ladders and Holes, by Mal McCrea

You Paint Like a Sculptor, by Alexis Huntsman

Transitions, by Kim Blankenship

The Light You Carry, by Emily Orsich

Promise Land, by Keri Graham

Because (l), Why (r), by Samuel Gentile

Millennium Simulation, by Alaska Thompson

By Tom Wachunas

 “The act of painting is a clash of different worlds, which in their conflict with each other create new worlds. For me, one of the most intriguing aspects of the studio is the quest for making paintings that have an equivalence in two or more directions. The paintings derive from a system of metaphors drawn from physical science. A kind of blank slate which allows me to describe what I think I know about existing in time and space, history and nature.”  -Jack McWhorter (1950 – 2022) 

EXHIBIT: Forward Formations: Students Celebrate the Life of Jack McWhorter / at Patina Arts Centre, 324 Cleveland Ave. NW, downtown Canton, Ohio / THROUGH FEB. 25, 2023 / Viewing hours Thursdays Noon to 8 p.m., Saturdays Noon to 9 p.m.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:  Sarah Amatangelo, Kimberly Blankenship, Jessica Bracken, Noah DiRuzza, Samuel Gentile, Casey Herndon, Rita Hoagland, Nick Hoover, Alexis Huntsman, Kristi Karickhoff, Azia Mae Layman, Keri Marie, Madi Miller, Daniel McLaughlin, David McDowell, Sarah Flower-McVey, Mal McCrea, Jack McWhorter, Emily Orsich, Justin Randall, Natalie Swonger, Brandy Torch, Alaska Thompson, Kaley Weaver, Megan Wanderer, David Whiteman

  Students once under the tutelage of Painter and Professor Jack McWhorter, who passed away on May 1, 2022, have come together to celebrate his life and legacy through a shared exhibition. Jack was a prolific and accomplished artist, and a beloved, influential teacher of painting for 32 years at Kent State University at Stark. Each artist in this thoughtful and compelling tribute - which includes some paintings by McWhorter - created a work of art inspired by one of his pieces.

   At the core of McWhorter’s aesthetic is a persistent navigation of tensions and harmonies within symbiotic dualities. His compositions, which he called “live surfaces,” are clusters or matrixes of lines, shapes, and patterns that juxtapose accumulations and singularities, gatherings and dispersals. Like an explorer’s field notes on remembered sights and sites, places and spaces, his pictures often entwine a then with a now, as if remembering their own beginnings even as they were being transformed by his intuition and imagination into wholly new visual moments.

   New visual moments. The artists in this exhibit haven’t settled for merely copying an exact style, technique or content of a McWhorter original. After all, this exhibit is about inspiration, not imitation. Amidst the great diversity of formal approaches here, there is nonetheless a palpable sense of kindred spirits speaking in their own distinctive dialects, connecting to the act of making art with passion and panache.

   The very walls of Patina Arts Centre have indeed become live surfaces.